Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips For Your Blog Posts

SEO, SEO, SEO.

Once you become a blogger, you see this bloody acronym every where.

What’s so important about it? Does it matter to me?

That depends. How important is website traffic to you? If you’re looking to gain exposure for your blog posts, having your blog found in search engines is a big plus. People searching for specific terms that relate to your posts will be able to find you.

Blog posts are naturally search engine friendly because

• blogs are frequently updated with new pages
• blog posts are text rich
• blog posts have links to other pages that are related to the blog post

So if you’ve been writing posts consistently, that are of average length and include links to other posts on your site that relate or other blogs that share the same niche, you’re already doing a great job at assisting the search engine spiders.

Spiders?

Spiders my friend.

Ok, not real spiders.

It’s actually a computer program that crawls the www the same way you would from safari or firefox.

It can start crawling anywhere and stop anywhere. It follows  links to get from one site to another. When it’s done crawling, it takes what’s it learned and drops it into a database – a search engine’s database (Google’s, Yahoo’s, Bing’s, etc) where it’s indexed and saved. When a user enters a specific term into, for example, Google’s search box, the results are pulled from that database; ranking is based on relevance to the search term. The higher your post ranks in the search engine, the higher the possibility that your link will be clicked on.

So how do we optimize our blogs for search engines? There’s actually various ways to do this. But let’s start simple.

Search Engine Optimize Your Domain Name

First of all, what I’ve learned is, if search engine traffic is crucial to you, use your main topic keyword, in your domain name.

Obviously, I didn’t do this. When I first started this blog, exactly a year ago, I wasn’t thinking about search engines. Frankly I don’t think about it much for my own site at all. What I was thinking about was a catchy blog name. Since I would be writing after bedtime . . . Well. Ya’ know. Also? I had this whole scenario in my head about how people would refer to it. It went like this:

A married couple having coffee at the kitchen table. Their kids, still asleep. The husband is reading his newspaper while the wife is reading on her laptop, reading my blog, chuckling.

Husband: “What’s so funny? What are you reading?”

Wife: “Oh, I’m reading a blog by a mom who blogs after bedtime.”

Obviously my scenario was half baked. If it were fully baked, I would have realized the husband’s next question may have been “Oh, what does she blog about? Bedtime rituals for her kids? Activities for bedtime? What she does with her husband after her kids go to bed?” (And then of course he’d wink at her.)

Do I write about any of these topics?

Anyways, if search engine traffic is crucial to you, use your main topic keyword, in your domain name. For example, if you want your blog to get found in the search engines for the term “after bedtime” then After Bedtime Blog is a perfect domain name.

If you’ve already screwed it like I did, but don’t care since you like the name, you can still make your posts search engine optimized. Frankly, it’s the post that will get you ranked in the search engines. (And yes, if you type After Bedtime into the Google Search Engine, My site is first)

Basic tips to make your blog post SEO friendly:

1. Match your content to your title. Don’t name the post “thirty ways to barbeque your mother-in-law” and then write about recycling for the environment.
2. Use your post topic’s key words in the post’s title and headings tags. This is how the spider “decides” whether your content body is relevant to the post title. For example, if you want your post to be found by users searching for “after bedtime activities” then your post title and heading should have one or more of these words in them. Such as
   • Title: Bedtime Activities For Toddlers
   • (h1)Main Heading: Bedtime Activites
   • (h2)Sub Heading: Toddler Bedtime Stories
   • (h2)Sub Heading: Bedtime Games
   • (h2)Sub Heading: Bedtime Stories
   • (h2)Sub Heading: Tips For Putting Your Toddler Down at Bedtime
   • Quick Rule: Only one Main Heading per post
3. Use secondary keywords in the body of your post. These are words that relate to the topic. Bold and italicize these words when possible. This also helps your friendly spider. Don’t go crazy, your post will look like crap.
4. All images should have Alt Text that applies to your post. Spider can’t see images, but if there’s alternate text there, it counts for something.
5. Include links to other posts on your site and use actual anchor words. If you’re link to a post about barbeque sauces, be sure that the anchor words that are linked to the post is “barbeque sauces”, not the word “here” as we’ve all done. You want the anchor words to be relevant to the post you’re linking to.
6. Choose Categories and Tags that relate to your post.

And that’s it! If steps 2 to 5 seem a little confusing, don’t worry, here’s my first tutorial movie which shows you these basic tips in action! Update: June 24, 2011, that tutorial has gone MIA. Seems I’ll need to make a new one.

Yes, you’re about to hear the non-sultry sounds of my dorky voice about a geeky topic.But it’s ok. I love showing off my dorkiness and I’m so happy to know that my fellow bloggers can benefit from it. By the way, it’s 2:14 am. Excuse my tired non-sulty, dorky voice.

Special thanks to Angel and Tracie for kicking my ass in gear to write this post and finally use this mic I bought.
By the way, if you’re a WordPress user or a Blogger considering the move, check out SEO Made Easy for a short video on my SEO plugin of choice.

Photocredit:
macromagnon via photoxpress (desk and www)
Nicemonkey via photoxpress (spider)x

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